Title: Multi-channel time-frequency fusion attacks

Authors: Yuchen Cao; Yongbin Zhou; Hailong Zhang

Addresses: State Key Laboratory of Information Security, Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Minzhuang Rd. 89-A, 100093, Beijing, China; School of Cyber Security, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Yuquan Rd. 19A, 100049, Beijing, China ' State Key Laboratory of Information Security, Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Minzhuang Rd. 89-A, 100093, Beijing, China; School of Cyber Security, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Yuquan Rd. 19A, 100049, Beijing, China ' State Key Laboratory of Information Security, Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Minzhuang Rd. 89-A, 100093, Beijing, China

Abstract: Side-channel analysis (SCA) is one of the most powerful attacks against cryptographic implementations. Multi-channel fusion attack (MCFA) which can utilise leakages measured from different side channels is a new type of SCA. Till now, existing MCFAs mainly work in the time domain. This paper take time-frequency joint information into consideration, and proposes time-frequency fusion attacks (TFFA). TFFA can be easily expanded to multi-channel case, and this kind of attack is named multi-channel time-frequency fusion attack (MCTFFA). In comparison to existing MCFAs, TFFA and MCTFFA are more effective. Practical experiments against unprotected AES-128 (implemented on MCU and FPGA) and masked AES-128 (implemented on FPGA) show that proper MCTFFA can reduce the number of traces needed to achieve a success rate of 1 by 23% to 60%, compared to that of MCFA. These improvements can be achieved without overhead in measurement complexity.

Keywords: side channel attacks; SCA; multi-channel fusion attacks; MCFA; time-frequency fusion attacks; TFFA; multi-channel time-frequency fusion attacks; MCTFFA.

DOI: 10.1504/IJICS.2021.117396

International Journal of Information and Computer Security, 2021 Vol.16 No.1/2, pp.84 - 102

Received: 22 Jun 2018
Accepted: 17 Oct 2018

Published online: 06 Sep 2021 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article